President Barack Obama’s attempted escape from the Obamacare rollout is all about Republican obstructionism.

One week after cratering polls and fleeing Democrats spurred a long tortured apology, the president was back at the podium to stop playing defense.

Obama invoked George Washington, but the sense was more John Paul Jones — he has not yet begun to fight.

For three weeks during the government shutdown, Obama kept his hold on Americans by asking people to reject Republicans who he said were more interested in causing chaos than governing. That’s what he returned to Thursday.

“Obstruction,” “abuse,” “harmful” — Obama used them all to describe what Republicans in the Senate have been doing by filibustering his nominees. But his takeaway was even simpler: it’s just wrong.

“It’s not what our Founders envisioned,” he said. “A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal.”

To opponents, Obama endorsed a power grab that overturns nearly a century of tradition. There are people who’ve worried about his dreams of an imperial government from the day he launched his presidential campaign in Springfield, but there’s no winning those people for Obama.

The president needed to win back the people who used to see him as the embodiment of rational competence, and whose support has been dying the death of a hundred thousand Error 404 messages. He didn’t discuss the Affordable Care Act, a website, a broken promise of people being able to keep their coverage. He barely mentioned the judicial nominees whose failure to get confirmed were the immediate cause of the showdown.

Obama’s sending a welcome message to core supporters that he’s not done yet, and not letting the GOP define who he is or what he does. No more will he be the man slowly consumed by the Obamacare disaster blob or look less and less like a person in control of running the country or his administration.

“Today, by action, if the Senate carries out its constitutional responsibilities by voting on presidential appointments, that’s a victory for the president,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), saying he believes the vote gives Obama’s presidency a jolt. “He knows he’ll get his team in place now, he’ll get his judges confirmed.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), though, issued an apocalyptic warning that the result will allow what he called rubber-stamp judges to inoculate his administration against any Obamacare lawsuits and let the president escape the truth on Benghazi which the senator hoped to force by putting holds on nominees.

Senate Democrats may one day — even as soon as the first week of January 2015 — regret making good on their promise to respond to years of potshots by going nuclear. They may regret putting vulnerable members of their conference in front of red state voters next year who’ll now be charged with abusing the minority. But the political calculation that getting the Senate under control, and helping the president recover so he doesn’t poison any hopes of holding the majority isn’t that complicated: Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) put his nuclear key in, and the president was right behind him with his own.

Just two days ago, Obama delivered an exhausted defense of his entire presidency at a Wall Street Journal forum, justifying where he’s come up short and pointing out where he feels he’s been denied credit for successes. Thursday, he turned the argument back on Republicans: they’re the ones who stopped gun control, who won’t move immigration, who’ve repeatedly harmed the economy. They’re the ones who hurt the environment by trying to stop his EPA nominee, they’re the ones who are leaving the aftermath of the housing market collapse without a federal regulator.

“This isn’t obstruction on substance, on qualifications,” Obama said. “It’s just to gum up the works.”

And reviving another favorite line from the shutdown, Obama said, what’s going on “is not a game,” even as he alluded to private conversations with Senate Republicans who have admitted to him that they think it’s become one, and they’re tired of playing.

Senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, who is in regular touch with corporate executives and Wall Street, said she did not believe Reid’s move in the Senate would make another shutdown or debt limit crisis any more likely because Republicans would not want to repeat past mistakes.

“They saw the negative impact that had on the economy the last time,” she said.

Changing the rules, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office eagerly pointed out Thursday, used to be something Democrats opposed, highlighting 2005 quotes from then-Sen. Obama warning of “an end to democratic debate” and then-Sen. Joe Biden calling the nuclear option “arrogance of power” and a “a fundamental power grab.”

But after years of hold-ups despite a Senate that’s been Democratic for every single day of Obama’s presidency, those positions have changed, as have those of many core liberal interest groups, like women’s groups and organized labor, who used to worry about what might be wreaked by GOP appointees.

Thursday afternoon, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry issued a statement saying they “fully support” Reid’s “courageous step” against a Senate minority that’s opposed appointees for “petty political reasons or for no reason at all.”

But speaking Wednesday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) disputed the figures that show obstructionism at historic highs, arguing that “this Congress is not much different from any other.”

Citing conversations with Democratic colleagues, McCain indicated an interest in being more selective in which nominees were held up or opposed and said he was open to rules changes, but warned of the damage to the institution from doing so by a simple majority vote instead of seeking a wider consensus.

Many Democrats, McCain charged, don’t have a full sense of what eliminating filibusters would mean, and won’t until they’re out of power.

“There’s a great deal of frustration on the part particularly who have not been in the minority, they feel frustrated, they don’t understand it,” McCain said. “You have to have been in the minority to really appreciate the reason why the minority does what they do.”

In a statement released by his office, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) fired back on this thinking.

“We’d much prefer the risk of up or down votes and majority rule than the risk of continued total obstruction,” Schumer said. “That’s the bottom line no matter who’s in power.”

Who’s in power, McConnell said Thursday, is indeed the question. And Thursday’s vote, will ultimately rebound against Obama and Senate Democrats to help answer that.

“The solution to this problem is an election,” said McConnell. “The solution to this problem is at the ballot box. We look forward to having a great election on 2014.”